You hear it all the time. Who will get the black vote? Who will get the Hispanic vote? Who will get the evangelical vote? Who will get the white vote? As if all demographic groups are somehow monolithic. Hint, they aren't.
As an evangelical, I'm amazed that pundits just assume we're all conservative. Don't get me wrong, I'm under no illusions. Most of my brethren are conservative. But a good many of us aren't. Some, like me, are liberal and some are more moderate. The point is, like birds, we all don't flock together.
Last February, when it was discovered that Virginia governor Ralph Northam, while a student in college, posed for a picture in blackface that eventually found its way into his yearbook, I, like many liberals, called for his resignation. I felt it was inappropriate. This is what I wrote back then:
There is no justification for this. None! Nor is there any excuse that passes the smell test. To even suggest there is offends any sense of decency a civilized society possesses. And for Democrats, this isn't just a political issue, it's a moral one. Ralph Northam, the Democratic governor of Virginia, did something profoundly wrong and he must be held accountable.Know who didn't call for Northam's resignation? The majority of the African American community in Virginia, that's who. Yep, strange as it might seem, the very people who should have been outraged the most by what Northam did, and his lame-ass excuse of an apology at his press conference, were the ones who, by and large, decided to give him a pass. Not they thought that what Northam did was right, mind you, but they decided that their political interests were better served by him staying in office than by him resigning. While the liberal media got on its high horse, blacks opted for good old fashioned pragmatism.
I learned something during that scandal; something that most pundits still don't quite grasp. You can never predict how voters are going to react in any given situation. Take Michael Bloomberg, for instance. By every objective metric, he should be about as popular with African Americans as Ice-T attending a Policeman's ball. His stop and frisk policy as mayor of New York not only unjustly targeted blacks, but as we now know from the data, had no impact whatsoever in reducing overall crime in the city. In other words, it was nothing more than racial profiling to its nth degree. Adding insult to injury, Bloomberg didn't even concede that his policy was wrong and damaging until literally days before announcing he was running for president.
And yet, Bloomberg is polling at 22 percent among African Americans, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll, only seven points behind Joe Biden, who two months earlier was at 49 percent approval among blacks. Don't look now, but Biden's firewall in South Carolina appears to be crumbling. According to RCP's betting average, Bloomberg has risen from 15.1 precent to 34.6 percent in just the last eleven days. In case you were wondering, Biden is currently at 9.8 percent, down from a high of 37.9 percent in late January. I guess $380 million does buy something after all. As of right now, the smart money - pardon the pun - is on Sanders and Bloomberg duking it out at the convention in July. One guy wants to start a revolution, the other wants to own the licensing rights to it.
But getting back to Bloomberg and his popularity among African Americans, it's hard to know what motivates a person to vote for a particular candidate. As a Christian, it deeply offends me that there are those within my faith who voted for Trump in 2016 and are likely to do so again this November. I find absolutely nothing Christ-like about the man. In fact, from everything I've learned about Jesus, Trump is the polar opposite of him. Indeed, Trump would make the Pharisees of that time look good by comparison. The only explanation I can come up that makes any sense at all for why any Christian would vote for such a man is that it was in their self interest to do so. To paraphrase a well-known political axiom, it's the judges, stupid. They want Roe v. Wade overturned and Trump, they believe, is the president who can get it done, so many of them held their nose and pulled the lever for him.
When I look back at the 2016 Democratic primaries, I sometimes wonder why Bernie Sanders didn't resonate more with African American voters. He certainly had some good policy proposals that would've addressed their needs. Part of it, I suppose, was his personality, or lack thereof. The man reminds me of every college professor I ever had: pompous and full of himself. But there was more to it than just that. After all, it's not like he was running against Mother Teresa. Hillary Clinton wrote the book on arrogance.
No, what I think happened is that while Clinton kept it simple and stuck to kitchen table issues, Sanders was a bit too nuanced for their tastes. It's hard to focus on the future when you don't have this month's rent. Maybe Bernie could've helped them down the road, but Hillary understood what they were going through right then and now. Retail politics always wins elections. At least that's how I think it went down. Then again, I'm not black, so I can only look at the polling and surmise.
It would be a mistake for pundits to dismiss Michael Bloomberg simply because of stop and frisk; just like it was a mistake for them to dismiss Joe Biden for supporting the 1994 crime bill; a bill, I would remind everyone, that Sanders also supported and voted for. My point is that no one is perfect. Not Ralph Northam, not Joe Biden, not Bernie Sanders and certainly not Michael Bloomberg. And I think that most black voters understand that.
In fact, the only thing I can't wrap my head around is why Pete Buttigieg is still so unpopular among African Americans. Is what happened in South Bend really that much worse than what happened in New York City? Maybe it is, I don't know. Or perhaps, it has more to do with the overall perception of the man. After all, most black voters didn't think Barack Obama had an ice-cube's chance in hell of capturing the White House in '08. But once he proved himself by winning Iowa, they took him seriously and threw their support behind him. Now don't get me wrong: I'm not suggesting that Buttigieg is the next Obama, even though there are some similarities between the two. What I am suggesting is that maybe Mayor Pete's biggest hurdle in the black community has more to do with his prospects than with his past deeds. I get the hunch that if Buttigieg had Bloomberg's bankroll, his approval numbers among African Americans would be considerably higher than they are now, if for no other reason than he would be their best hope of beating Trump.
Again it comes down to self interest. I know it sounds crass, but I don't have any other plausible explanation for why a growing number of prominent African American leaders are suddenly getting behind a man who is on record as saying that the best way to deal with people of color suspected of crimes is to throw them against the wall and frisk them. You either have to believe that they're blind to what happened - which I don't - or that there's another motive at work.
Look, these are perilous times in America. Sometimes you have to choose between the lesser of two evils. If Christians can rationalize their decision to support the most unChrist-like president in the history of the nation, then maybe black people can, if not forgive, certainly come to peace with a man who, if he wins, will be far more likely to advance their agenda than the current occupant of the Oval Office.
I'm sure Ralph Northam would concur.
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